Confessions of a Digital Hoarder

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Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Angela Horn of Mostly Mindful.

In 2008 I convinced my wife, Sporty, that we should sell 90% of our belongings. I gave a TEDx talk called: The less you own, the more you have. And I brag about how little we now own every chance I get. If there was a secret club for minimalists, I’d probably join it.

But recently I realized—or rather, finally admitted to myself—that while my outer world may accurately reflect my ‘less is more’ lifestyle, my online life paints a somewhat more cluttered picture.

The Weight of Clutter

Anyone who has ever spent time decluttering will attest to the light feeling that arrives almost immediately after cleaning out the garage, hall closet, kids’ toy room, or whatever. There’s a sense of freedom that comes from getting rid of the junk and tidying up. It’s like you can breathe again.

What a lot of people don’t realize, however, is that all clutter weighs on you—even if it’s not taking up physical space. If your email inbox is a mess, it’s going to take up residence in the back of your mind until you do something about it.

The Many Forms of Digital Clutter

At least with physical stuff you have tangible reference points. You can no longer park your car in the garage, you risk life and limb every time you open the hall closet or you’re continually tripping over your kids’ toys. Digital clutter however, is both sneaky and insidious. The evidence is hidden on your laptop and various other devices, so nobody but you is privy to the mess.

In my first ever office job, we used floppy disks to store our work. Each disk had a sum total of 1.2 megabytes of space available. Our hard drives were also pathetically small, so we had no choice but to be discerning about what we saved. The advent of the Cloud means storage space is now infinite.

From your email inbox and photos to bookmarked websites, eBooks and newsletters, the extent to which you’re able to hoard in virtual space is scary.

Right, now that I’ve outed myself as a digital hoarder (and given away my age), let’s look at the different kinds of online clutter and what we can do to lighten the virtual load. (I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing I’m not the only one with this problem?)

Emails.

Emails are the new paper trail; they’re the evidence we need to prove we contacted that client, placed that order or deleted that account. But somehow we’ve lost the ability to discern what’s important and what’s not. It’s almost easier to just keep everything. You know, just in case.

The other morning, I received this email from a friend I haven’t seen in a long time.

Subject: Cleaning up the inbox.

The note was short and to the point: “I am doing an inbox clean up and wanted to check if this was still your address?”

Wow, I thought, how clever to do that at the beginning of the year. Then I glanced down and saw that she’d replied to an email I’d sent her in September of 2014! (She was working her way through 8000+ emails, I kid you not!)

I’m in no position to judge though. I still have emails from a client I haven’t worked with in more than two years. They’re all neatly filed in properly labeled folders, so of course I felt justified to just leave them there.

Note to self: Organizing is not the same as decluttering!

Action: Empty ‘trash’, delete all ‘sent items’ older than six months and get rid of all of those, umm, ‘organized’ emails.

Subscriptions (newsletters, RSS feeds, etc.)

I have an annoying habit of subscribing to every vaguely interesting blog I come across. Either they’re offering some cool freebie or I want to see what sort of content they share with their subscribers. But then the emails arrive and I ignore them.

I signed up for Feedly because I wanted a central place to read the latest posts of all the blogs I follow. But the problem with Feedly (or any other RSS feed) is that if you ignore it, it’ll quickly turn into the virtual equivalent of that deadly hall closet.

Action: Unsubscribe from any newsletter you ignore for more than two days. Schedule a reminder to log in at least once a week to see what’s going on in the blogosphere. Assess what you’re reading and what you’re not, and make the necessary changes. Make a point of not following more than five blogs at a time. Quality over quantity.

Downloadables (eBooks, PDFS, photos, misc. Files, etc.)

I haven’t looked at the gazillion photographs I have stored in Dropbox in years. A lot of people would argue that photos are important, a link to the pastif you will. If you’re someone who actually looks at the photos you’ve taken, then it makes sense to keep them. That’s not me.

I love reading. I’m a grabby piglet when it comes to books. I still take books out at the library, but the majority of my reading happens online. There’s a problem with having instant access to millions of books though. Right now I have 151 books on my Kindle and I’ve read only 80 of them.

I also have a bunch of writing-related Word docs as well as PDFs and eBooks (remember the newsletters I signed up for?) on Google Drive and DropBox. Again, just in case.

Action: Delete all old photos. Read all unread books on your Kindle before you buy more. Read all PDFs, eBooks, etc. by the end of the month and then delete the lot. Sort writing documents into a system that makes sense. Delete anything old or half-baked.

Bookmarking (Save for later services)

I used to bookmark the old school way, but then I discovered Pocket. I added the Chrome extension, downloaded the app to my phone and immediately set about saving absolutely everything. Over the holidays I spent a couple of hours categorising the 100+ articles I’d pocketed. Seriously?

Action: Commit to reading any new articles saved within a week. Do a blanket clean out once a week so you can begin the new week with a clean slate (or in this case, an empty pocket).

Cloud Storage.

Cloud storage is one area where Sporty beats me at hoarding.

(It’s not just me!)

She has two Dropbox accounts and two Google Drive accounts (one for business and one personal). She also has an iCloud account, two project management tools that give her the option to store files and finally, she has finance software that she uses to store invoices.

Granted, a lot of these are for work, but still. I see plenty of room here for amalgamation and simplification. Or maybe I’m just deflecting?

Action: Declutter my own digital space before pointing a finger at someone else’s.

There are plenty of opportunities out there for creating digital clutter. I’ve included the ones that I’m guilty of, but I’m sure there are plenty of others that I haven’t thought of. What about you, how cluttered is your digital life? What can you do to streamline your cyberspace?

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Angela lives in Cape Town. She enjoys spending her time drinking coffee and writing about her urban hippie adventures on Mostly Mindful.

About Joshua Becker

Writer. Inspiring others to live more by owning less.WSJ Bestselling author of The More of Less.

Comments

I always knew thus day was coming. LOL. You caught me. My Email and Cloud storage accounts are a mess. I agree, it does weigh on you mentally. This is going to be a process for me because I don’t have a system figured out yet. Thanks for the inspiration Angela.

I’m good at this , Joshua. Besides your blog…I spend very little time on the internet—etc. I am not on Facebook because I am happily under the radar :) I had a flip-phone till recently…and just got a sorta-smart phone about a month ago, because I need to be in contact with work now that my new job requires phone communication ( I work in the field ). I never subscribe to anything or take online classes. Never ;)

Working on a big DELETE this morning. Taking care of old photos that aren’t good enough to keep, a couple hours later more than 1,200 are gone and my digital space is able to breathe a bit easier. Me too.

That’s exactly the difference between me and my bf. I literally have less than 30 e-mails that I save (some are archived because they may be important to retrieve at some point but not needed instantly), where my boyfriend usually has around 5000+ unread e-mails and thousands more that he’s opened but never watches. I tried convincing him to unsubscribe and remove non required e-mails (such as digital bills that are paid, steam sales, other discounts and commercials) but he keeps on hoarding. Drives me nuts although I’m not the one who has to look at the over crowded e-mail. He does the same with bookmarks not even labeling and sorting for easy access, instead his bookmark bar is crowded with full website names for things he doesn’t look at.

So incredibly embarrassed to admit that I now have over 16,000 emails still sitting in my inbox, some read and some still unread. Incredibly I actually deleted about 1,000 over the weekend. Thanks for the encouragement to keep on purging and unsubscribing.

Great honesty. I stopped using Pocket a while ago after I realized it was just becoming a garbage dump for articles I would never have time to read. I like your 1 week reading commitment – I’ve gotta try that.

Yeah David, I’m also starting to wonder if Pocket isn’t just a fancy app masquerading as a dumping ground for stuff I thought I’d read? I’m going to give the one week rule a try, but if it doesn’t work then it’s sayonara Pocket! :)

My husband is a digital hoarder. I told him your total Matt, and he came back after about 20 minutes and said his total was 25,000!! And that is after doing a big clear out some years ago. At first he said he wasn’t going through things because what did it matter? But he changed his mind and is having a great old time deleting stuff. So I count that a win for you Angela!

Digital clutter is so challenging for me. I love going through old photos, if, and it’s a big if, I have edited, cleaned, and sorted them. But I start slacking and just dumping images on my computer. I’m trying to get better about deleting the crap ones as I take them. It’s easy to do bit by bit, but gets crazy when I find I have 500 images to go through.

That is probably my biggest challenge. I will be diligently working toward this alongside you!! I love pictures, but I HATE wading through them when I need one. Organization by date and event is not enough! I take too many and don’t delete them (in case they are magically better later?… not sure why).

Hey Ms Montana
I have had the same problem over the years and at the end of last year I decided to keep one good pic of each person per year. That has dramatically cut down on the amount of pics I was storing as well as eliminating the overwhelm when I look at the folders ;)

Another big form of digital clutter is receiving spam emails…whether from websites or stores you once checked the yes box to “send me emails”. Every January, I take the time to unsubscribe from all these lists..cleaner inbox, easier to check your email, less to declutter! http://www.hopepostkids.com

You got me! I laughed at this, cause this is so me! I hunt through emails trying to find a specific one. Dropbox notified me that I’d not signed on in over a year and would close my account in 90 days…and of course lose all that “important stuff” that I’ve not looked at !

Ha ha ha! We once had a hard drive with all our back-ups stored on it. We lugged it around with us for years. So long that one day we looked at it and wondered what was on there! Defny time to erase and turf ;)

I call this ‘cloud clutter’. For me, it isn’t the inbox or the files that make me feel stressed… it is the amount of social media out there. I like blogging and will continue to read and comment on blogs, but that’s about it. I gave up Facebook years ago and I am still resisting Twitter and Instagram. I even gave up my smart phone and went back to a flip phone. I realized that I am online enough with my computer, that when I unplug, I want to really unplug and experience the real world.

I would highly recommend a program like Unroll.Me that will automatically pull your subscriptions and allow you to unsubscribe with one click, keep it in your inbox, or “roll it up” into a once-a-day digest. Very helpful.

This is definitely me. Each time I get a new computer I copy over everything from the old computer ‘in case it is important’. I think I might have 3 computers worth on my current computer. There must be so many duplicates! It is one of my goals to start tackling this…after I read my 300 unread emails and continue my unsubscribe purge that I have been doing this month

Hey Sarah, sounds like you’ve got quite a bit to tackle. I reckon small bits every day will get you through ;) Set a task of focusing for 15 minutes every day, then try and stick to the time so you don’t experience overwhelm.

I had a MacbookPro with 500GB+1TB drives full of digital clutter. Because i didn’t want to buy my wife a new computer i decided i will give her mine and will find a way to make her MacbookAir (120GB drive) work for me. It was quite a challenge, but i figured out which stuff i really need for work and for personal use. I got rid of evernote, feedly, documents unused for years and years, got rid of my email archive (minimised and redirected everything to one account with multiple identities). Documents and work related stuff now amounts to about 5GB easily accessible on my owncloud. Pictures (i am a photo geek) – in the beginning my library was 120GB so i got rid of Aperture.app as i figured out it makes photo library twice as big. And after that i organized everything in folders by years and went through each and every and deleted mercilessly leaving only the best and important. Finished at 26GB. And now i do my digital imaging from Camera to Phone then editing and sharing online and after that only select pictures go to my computer via owncloud. By the time they arrive on my computer they are already edited and done. Family videos take up around 30GB. I merged videos by year using quicktime player – couldn’t be bothered editing those :)

I am right there with Ingus…though I also have my business archive (is it really protection against the forces that be in case of an “audit”?.
I travel the world and have the photos to what? Prove it? I have not edited those trips in a few years I must confess. Then there is the music of mine, my former roommates, my husband – so much not even to my taste. Never mind the SEO pdf’s from 8 years ago. I feel like I need a snowstorm so I can just hunker down with the computer and practice by hitting the delete button.
And email…sigh…email. I ran an internet company WAY back and still have nearly every email…ever.
So as in physical “stuff” I am using the analogy of a car windshield with the past in the rearview mirror…getting smaller and smaller…letting things go as history moves further from my present. I would love to hear more actionable strategies if you have them.

Wow Ron, sounds like you have your work cut out for you! I’ll ponder some more actionable steps, but in the meantime what about committing to cleaning out your digital clutter for just 10-20 minutes everyday?

That way it’s not this mammoth, overwhelming task, but rather a small chunk of time in which you do whatever you can? :)

Wow Ingus, that’s incredible. It just goes to show what we’re capable of when we set our mind to it, right!? I’m interested to know, how often do you go back and watch your videos and look at your photos? Just curious. :)

We have them as a screensaver on our tv, and we make calendars for family as a present almost every year. And during holidays we show selections from the years long ago and laugh at ourselves with family :) When some years ago i almost lost all of our pictures i cried. I show pictures of my mom to my kids sometimes, because they never met her. Pictures bring back memories and emotions for us. Photography is my passion, any event with camera in hand becomes adventure – like fishing or hunting for other man. For me it is the light, the angle, the moment. But as i said, i delete them ruthlessly and leave only the best. For example – week long vacation is about 10-20 pics, no more; family reunion – 20-30; christmas – 2-3.

Wow, your post really hit home. I’m 65 but worked for IBM and got “into” computers early on, and now am somewhat hooked to them… and I am a digital hoarder as well. This will motivate me to do some serious housecleaning, both on files and on email folders. (I did install Evernote a few weeks ago and love their clipping app, so if an email contains important information I want to keep, it can be clipped and filed in an Evernote note. Only for very important info)

The only disagreement I have is deleting old photos…. I figure when I’m sitting in a nursing home, they may be the one thing that cheers me up… I led a good life!

I have went into minimalism for 5 years now. But digital hoarding is still quite common for me. The pictures are all too hard for me to let go as well as some files that I think I may need in the future.

Yip, photos can be tough to let go of. I still have family photos (prints not digital) that I’m holding onto, even though I don’t look at them because, to be honest, they always make me feel a little down in the dumps. I still have to figure out what to do with them, but luckily it’s just a really small pile.

For your ‘just in case’ stuff, I’d suggest putting a timeframe on them. For example, if you haven’t looked at or used them in a year, then let them go. :)

Why do they make you feel down in the dumps? I have, in the past, kept photos I couldn’t bear to look at because I had lost someone and thinking of those times with them was just to painful. Now that the grief has past they are treasured memories and I do not want to forget that those people were in my life.

I think it all down to collecting. As seen from many ways, collecting is just a pointless move. In the end, our “collection” will only eat up the available time and space. Digital collections are way more dangerous as it is not in the form of physical. But as nicely stated in this article, the best way to get rid of collecting is to remove it. Even easier for digital collections, all we need is to push “delete” button.

Digital hoarding *seems* so harmless, because it doesn’t really get in my way (the way physical clutter does). But deleting all the unwanted emails that show up in my email box every morning takes time. Thanks for the motivation to deal with that clutter as well.

OMG!!! I think I need some very serious help, I am a digital hoarder. I can’t stop, I try to pair it down so to speak only to fill it up quicker than it takes to organize and eliminate. I own one external Terabyte hard drive, and four (yes, I said 4) 500gb hard drives. I own over 3,000 digital books but have only read 3, and skimmed hundreds of non-fiction. My movie and television series collection is just as bad. Of course everything is neat and tidy by genre or subject matter, this makes it all okay because it’s organised? Not! My friends think I am a librarian and come to me for all their resource needs, and in a way I like being able to. I just can’t stop, what is wrong with me, this is not who I am, a “Hoarder”. My home would never reflect this, I am way to OCD for clutter. My biggest fear is that I would not have access to the internet or worse no power to keep my devices powered. Is there such a thing as Digital Anonymous?

Wow, you’ve got the digital clutter bug bad! I’m not even sure what to suggest, but I think that the mere fact that you’ve been able to admit you have a problem (on a public forum, no less) is a huge step in the right direction!

I don’t know if you’ve read it, but Joshua’s book, Simplify, is an excellent read. It offers 7 guiding principles to help anyone declutter their home and their life.

I’ll be honest, Sporty and I initially bought it so we could sign up for his affiliate programme, but even as card-carrying minimalists, we learnt a lot from the book! I highly recommend checking it out! :)

My digital clutter is not email but items I kept to use for future reference to write books or use for my website. I also am actually worse than you when it comes to books on my kindle. I have spent only about $50-60 in total in ebooks for my kindle but have well over 1200 on it . . . I love Bookbub and Amazon Top Sellers Free Listing.

The suggestion to drastically reduce the number of blogs I was following really worked for me. I didn’t quite get down to five, but I cut out quite a few, and for the first time in ages I felt like I had nothing to do on the internet :)